Abstract
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882. However far back in her life we look, we find that she was already a writer. She did not choose to write in the same way that others might choose to lay bricks or to become doctors. Writing, and specifically the writing of fictions, was already, even when she was very young, essential to her way of being, with her family and in the world. Long before it became a career, writing was already an essential part of her identity, of her sense of self. In her adult life it became a vital necessity, without which she would fall to pieces; the integrity of her personality depended upon it.
‘I cannot remember a time when Virginia did not mean to be a writer.’
(Vanessa Bell)1
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Notes
Vanessa Bell, ‘Notes on Virginia’s Childhood’, cited by Louise De-Salvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (Women’s Press, 1989) p. 138.
Cited by Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 15.
A Cockney’s Farming Experience, ed. Suzanne Henig (San Diego State University Press, 1972). This juvenile work is quoted extensively by Louise DeSalvo, op. cit., but her analyses seem to me to be fanciful.
See Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 105f; also Moments of Being.
Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, with Introductions by Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1926)
see also ed. Graham Ovenden, A Victorian Album: Julia Margaret Cameron and Her Circle (Secker and Warburg, 1975).
Monks House Papers MH/A.5c (University of Sussex Library), cited and discussed in Martine Stemerick, ‘Virginia Woolf and Julia Stephen: The Distaff Side of History’ in eds Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb, Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1983).
On Dr Savage and his role in Woolf’s life see Stephen Trombley, ‘All that Summer She was Mad’: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (Junction Books, 1981).
Alice Fox, Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association of America, 1982, vol. 97, p. 103–4
this is in reply to Katherine Hill, ‘Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution’, PMLA, 1981, vol. 96, pp. 351–62.
See also Louise DeSalvo, ‘As “Miss Jan Says”: Virginia Woolf’s Early Journals’, in ed. Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury (Macmillan, 1987), p. 96f
and Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (Women’s Press, 1989). DeSalvo quotes extensively from the early diaries. In my opinion her speculations about Woolf often go far beyond anything that could be supported by the known evidence.
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© 1991 John Mepham
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Mepham, J. (1991). 1882–1903: Virginia Stephen Becomes a Writer. In: Virginia Woolf A Literary Life. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21784-7_1
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